StoryBuzz Blog

I never intended to take an over-five-month hiatus from this course, but that’s what happens when you have a three year old! I’m also running my business…and let’s face it, writing books can be time consuming! But enough excuses, it’s time to get back to business. Stay tuned for next week’s new lesson. I plan to post it on Monday. In the meantime, visit me at twitter.com/storybuzz.

A quick note: Before you start Lesson Eighteen, I thought a few words on format were in order. You have officially started the second part/section of this course…Rewriting/Revision. It will last 25 weeks. In the first section, we had a Lesson, an Update and a Wrap-Up. In this section, we will only have the Lesson each week…which I will try to have posted by Monday morning of each week. Each Lesson will have an Assignment. On occasion, there will be two assignments–one for fiction and one for nonfiction/memoir. When there is only one assignment, it is suitable for both. I would also like to encourage you to visit the forum and leave comments. Being an online writing course gives us an opportunity to interact with each other…and it is my hope that we do more of that during this stage in the course! Have fun!

Lesson Eighteen: REWRITING–A Conversation

You: Do you mind to pass the sugar?

Me: You want some coffee with your sugar?

You: I’ll let you be the expert on writing, if you’ll let me be the expert on how I like my coffee.

Me: Fair enough. So what are we going to talk about?

You: Uh, I’m guessing from the title of the lesson, that I should say rewriting.

Me: It’s worth talking about…because not many people do it…or you could at least say that not many people do it to their full potential. And I should point out that rewriting doesn’t happen before the writing part. A lot of people leave that step out…

They’ll get a couple of pages or a chapter and then they go back and mark it all up. The cart before the horse, to use a tired cliche.

Stuck on the “writing” part? Check out the first fifteen lessons of this course.

So if you’re still here, I’m assuming you’ve spent 3 months or so getting a first draft together. While I enjoy writing the first draft, rewriting is where the “REAL” fun is!

You: You have a real fascination with “quotation marks.”

Me: It’s my way of emphasis. Getting the “point” across.

You: It’s “distracting.” If you “know” what I mean.

Me: I’ll work on that. But getting rid of “distractions” belongs in the Final Draft. We should stay on “rewriting” for now. I’ll talk a little about my novel in progress…Still Small Voice. It centers around a “Waco-style” standoff in a small town in Montana.

And I’ll tell you right up front that I didn’t know–in the first draft–that the standoff was going to play such a big role. I had been reading about Edgar Cayce. He was a very interesting character…a small town Sunday School teacher with a powerful gift.

You: Cayce’s the fellow that went into a trance-like state and made all of these predictions.

Me: That’s the fellow. He could also be called one of the early practitioners (at least in America) of herbal medicine. In his later life, he started doing what he called “Life Readings” which traced his clients’ past reincarnations.

You: Ah, a baptist with a reincarnation fetish.

Me: Yes…didn’t exactly make him popular with the church folk. But anyway, in that first draft, I was focusing more on the life of Cayce…but after reading through my first draft–which I call “looking for the story”–it dawned on me that while Cayce played a pivotal role…it was more of the background, the backbone if you will…and the real story focused on a woman who had lost her faith.

You: Ah, conflict.

Me: And my woman happens to be a surgeon with a grudge against organized religion who is thrown into a world of modern day miracles…

You: You’re holding my interest…

Me: And thrown into the mix is a huckster television evangelist, a cult who believes they are in possession of the reincarnated son of God and a rogue group of CIA agents who specialize in locating subjects with a penchant for predicting the future.

You: I smell a best seller on your hands.

Me: That’s not up to me. I just have to tell the best story I can tell and leave the rest up to the book buying public. And telling the best story I can tell, can only be done with vigorous…

You: Rewriting.

Me: You catch on quickly. I want to be as specific as I can (MY opinion) about what constitutes rewriting. While both are part of the revision/editing process, proofreading is NOT rewriting. Proofreading is proofreading. And it takes place AFTER the rewriting process. While I understand the urge to proofread as you go (remember there is no RIGHT way to create…just MY opinion) I think it slows down the process…and sometimes stops it altogether. Even if it doesn’t stop the process, proofreading before the final edit seems like a waste of time.

You: You strike me as one who thinks no time–as long as it is time spent writing–is wasted time.

Me: Calling me out, huh?

You: Just keeping you honest.

ME: You would be correct. However, when you are in the middle of the writing/rewriting process…and these are 2 distinct things…it seems that time best spent is actually time spent on the bigger picture. A thorough rewrite contains much adding and much deleting…and much moving things around. Why worry about a misspelled word/errant comma (proofreading) when you may lose the sentence entirely?

But you make a great point! This is NOT the scripture according to Timothy S. Miller. Only my opinion. A process that has served me well…but still strictly opinion. You need to do what works for you! This method is simply trying to strip away anything that would slow you down. When our hand is not moving, the old FEARmonger raises its ugly head.

You: And now my friends, a sermon on FEAR.

Me: Relax. No proselytizing here. But it’s not a bad subject to talk about for a second. FEAR is a writer’s worst enemy. Period. There’s really nothing more to say.

You: But you’ll say it anyway.

Me: If you ever find yourself sitting in front of your computer and the words just won’t come, it’s often a direct result of FEAR. FEAR of failure, FEAR of not being good enough, FEAR of embarrassing your family, FEAR of not being loved and accepted, FEAR of what your colleagues will think, FEAR of not being original, FEAR of being cliche, FEAR of being trite, FEAR of running out of ideas, FEAR that you won’t be able to repeat your last success, FEAR that it won’t be mainstream enough…

You: We get the point.

Me: And all of this is completely unnecessary. Completely unnecessary. Our FEARS are rarely rooted in reality. Our FEARS rarely come true. Sadly, we never have a chance to find out if the FEAR was justified (it never is) because we quit. We give up. We let FEAR win.

You: So now you’re going to show us breathing exercises so our FEAR will disappear.

Me: Uh, no. I’m going to tell you to write anyway. Regardless of the FEAR. I am afraid that my grandmother isn’t going to like my novel. Write anyway. I’m afraid it isn’t good enough to be published. Write anyway. I’m afraid my family will be embarrassed. Write anyway. I’m afraid what my colleagues will think of me. Write anyway.

You: That’s easier said than done.

Me: Not really. Writing is an action. You just sit down and do it. People do things regardless of their FEAR all of the time. What you’ll find out as you continue to write regardless of the FEAR, is that it gets easier and easier and the fear becomes smaller.

You: Clever how you typed “fear” in lowercase.

Me: Glad you caught that. At the end of the day, most of our fear is rooted in what others will think of our writing. I tell my clients to write as if nobody else is ever going to read it. Write for YOURSELF only. When you’re reading through the final draft, once it is finished…you can always cut something if you’re not willing to face the consequences. What we find out, is that once we’re that far…the things that we thought might be an issue, don’t bother us anymore.

Whether it’s the first draft or a second or third–when fear becomes UPPERCASE–keep writing anyway.

You: Can we move on?

Me: Good idea. As we practiced last week, once we have the first draft finished, I advocate taking a couple of days off to work on another project or watch some bad TV.

You: I thought you were a “write every day” kind of guy?

Me: I am, but if you’ve written every day for a solid three to four months, you deserve a break. You could always write a poem or an essay or do a little journaling. But the point is to take a couple of days away from the novel.

After you’ve had a couple of days away from it, you’ll find that when you do your first read through, you’ll see it in a fresh new way. And the first read through is a very important part of the process. I like to sit down with a cup of coffee and a pen and notebook.

I try to read it in one or two sittings. And I take notes. What I’m looking for are the things that jump out at me…good and bad. I actually prefer “inspired” and “uninspired” as opposed to good and bad, but you’ll know what I mean. There are some sections that will thrill you beyond belief. And there will be some sections that leave you feeling hollow. There will be some characters that excite you every time they appear. And there will be some characters that bore you to tears. There will be some sections that move along at a breakneck speed. And there will be sections that are slow and painful.

Take good notes. Write down what excites you. What doesn’t? What part of the story draws you in? What part leaves you hollow? What is your absolute favorite character? What is your least favorite? What threads in your story fizzle out? What storyline needs more development? Do any minor characters jump out at you as possibilities for a larger role? Are there major characters that don’t have much life in them and can either be dropped or further developed?

Do you spend a lot of your story giving background information that could either be brought to the present or cut altogether? In an early section of my first draft, Cayce played a prominent role, but became overshadowed by my doctor’s crisis of faith.

In my read through of the first draft, I realized that her story was much more intriguing and that I wanted to develop it more. Have you ever read a book and wished that the writer had focused more on a minor plot and less on the major plots?

The kind of rewriting that I’m talking about…a complete overhaul of the story in the second draft…doesn’t happen as much as it should. I’m convinced that the books that don’t keep us enthralled are a victim of the writer being too attached to the first draft.

Let’s face it, rewriting is hard work. I would argue that it’s much harder than writing a first draft. By hard, I mean demanding. Writers often aren’t willing to take the necessary steps they need to really find their story.

Maybe they spent countless hours on an outline before they started that first draft. Maybe they fell in love with the original idea and are unwilling to let the story take over and change their Master Plan.

But I am convinced if you take the time to really rewrite your book in a second and third draft, it will be a much better book and it will have been worth your time! Don’t be afraid to move sections from the end…to the beginning. Maybe you want to start from the middle of the book and you’re forced to cut the first half completely. CUT AWAY! It will be worth it. (Don’t cut yet…remember, we’re just taking notes.)

Use your notes from that first draft as a guide. With that said, your notes are just a guide. Nothing is in stone. Explore the many ways that you can make your book the kind of book you’ve always wanted to read!

You: Are you finished?

Me: Are you trying to tell me something?

You: I’m out of coffee.

Me: Well, I guess that will have to do for now.

You: Are you going to pay for my coffee?

Me: Only if you promise to buy next time.

You: Deal.

 (silence).

You: Aren’t you going to say anything else?

 (silence).

You: You’re actually giving me the last word?

 (more silence).

You: I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Assignment #1: Fiction

Read your book from start to finish. Have a notebook handy. If you want to scribble notes on the actual manuscript, you can do that as well. Write the notes where you want…but write plenty…this process will be your guide through the rest of the 24 lessons in this section.

One quick note before I tell you things to look for: You are reading for STORY, PLOT DEVELOPMENT, SETTING, CONFLICT/DRAMA and CHARACTERIZATION. You are not reading for sentence structure and the quality of the prose. We will read for that later. All we care about is the STORY in this read through.

Things to look for:

What is the setting for each scene? It can be as simple as John’s kitchen or John’s kitchen in his rented hotel suite in New York City, New York in the winter of 1986.

What excites you about each scene?

What bores you to tears?

What characters appear in each scene?

What are the characters doing in each scene?

Is there drama/conflict in each scene?

Does this scene move at a breakneck speed or is it slow and painful?

What part of the story draws you in?

What part of the story leaves you hollow?

What is your absolute favorite character?

What is your least favorite?

What threads in your story fizzle out?

What storyline (plotline) needs more development?

Do any minor characters jump out at you as possibilities for a larger role?

Are there major characters that don’t have much life in them and can either be dropped or further developed?

Do you spend a lot of your story giving background information that could either be brought to the present or cut altogether?

 Keep in mind, these are only suggestions. Take as many notes as you can. The more notes the better. See you next week!

Assignment #1: Non-Fiction/Memoir 

Read your book from start to finish. Have a notebook handy. If you want to scribble notes on the actual manuscript, you can do that as well. Write the notes where you want…but write plenty…this process will be your guide through the rest of the 24 lessons in this section.

In essence, you are outlining your book. You can make notes as to whether certain sections keep your attention or bore you to tears, but what you’re really doing with this read through is JUST getting down a synopsis of the book. 

If the first section is about snowmobile racing in Alaska, write that down. Add details as to who appears in the scene and what they are doing.

If you are writing a memoir about your childhood and the first section is about moving from Texas to California, write that down. Who appears in the scene? Where is the action located? In the car? On a train? Details, details, details.

By the end of this week, you should have gone through the entire book and created an outline. In the next 24 weeks, you will use this as a guide to determine the focus of your book and as a tool for REWRITING.

Things to look for:

Where does each section take place?

Who are the people involved?

Who is the major player in each section?

Is this a how-to book or a self-help book? Write down any principles or steps that you list in each section.

What sections make you laugh? What sections make you cry? What sections bore you to tears? Are there certain sections that don’t seem to fit?

Write everything down. Remember, thoroughness is the key. See you next week. 

 

 

Okay! You’ve been working hard for sixteen weeks! We’re about to embark on the Revision/Rewriting stage of the bookwriting process…but first things first. You need a week off. Don’t look at the book. Don’t re-read your favorite or least favorite passages. Don’t even think about it. You’re about to spend 25 weeks Rewriting! Trust me, you need this week off. And since Revision is about seeing your book in a whole new way, you’ll need to get that first draft out of your head so you can show up without a lot of baggage. Lesson Eighteen will be posted Monday morning. Don’t worry about your book until then. Have a GREAT week off! You deserve it!

Congratulations! You have officially completed all of the lessons in the First Section of this course. This week (which we’ll still call a lesson for continuity), we’ll do a quick flashback of the last fifteen lessons in preparation for next week, when you embark on what I think is the most important part of this course, and the most important part of writing a book.

You basically have one week to finish up your first draft. And frankly, I don’t care how you end your book. It might be helpful to wrap it up with some kind of ending, but if you just want to stop writing at the end of this week and type “THE END” at the bottom of the page…that’s fine too.

If you learned anything from the last fifteen lessons, I hope it would be this: it doesn’t matter what you are writing, only that you are doing it. To go back to the documentary filmmaker metaphor–which sadly fell by the wayside early on, appearing only when I remembered him–his only concern was collecting footage.

He knew that once he had a ton of footage, the editing process would begin. But you have to have something to edit. As I’ve said time and time again, you can’t edit NOTHING.

I hope the lessons were helpful and I hope from time to time they gave you something to write about, but at the end of the day, if you never used any of the lessons but wrote your hour a day, that would be fine. I don’t want to spill the beans before next week, but I’m telling you that you’ve only just begun. You’ve just created a skeleton that we can build on.

And we’ll build on that in the Revision/Rewriting stage…which will be the next 25 weeks or so. 25 weeks, you say? YIKES! It does seem like a long time, but if you really do a true REVISION of your first draft, you’ll need all 25 weeks. I guarantee it!

You’ll notice that I spent ZERO time talking about grammar. You’ll notice that I spent ZERO time talking about sentence structure. You’ll notice that I spent ZERO time talking about beautiful sentences and metaphors and similes. We’ll talk about some of that in the next section, but that wasn’t our focus in the first draft. Our focus was sitting down for an hour each day and moving your fingers.

Here’s a quick synopsis of some of the things we talked about in the first 15 weeks. We talked about building characters. We talked very briefly about the setting of your book. We talked about having conflict in your story. We talked about having plots and subplots. We talked about revealing a little at a time…building suspense. We talked about the importance of details. We talked about the four basic stories: SEARCH, ATTAINMENT, LOSS and SALVATION.

But the most important thing we talked about in the last 15 lessons, was the simple idea of writing without judgment. A first draft is a first draft for a reason. It’s all about just getting it down on paper.

Spend the rest of this week finishing your first draft. Since you only have a week left, writing an hour each day is a MUST. You might even want to write more. Just get it down. If you have been writing an hour each day, you should have 200 double spaced pages…if not more. But length doesn’t matter. Write as much as you can for the next week, and get ready to tackle the REVISION/ REWRITING stage. We’re going to have a blast.

If you talk to someone later in life and ask them to tell you about the stories that shaped them, they’ll tell you about stories of LOSS. But they won’t stop there. They’ll tell you how those stories of LOSS led them to try harder, changed their perspective, made them who they are now. Who they are now is the stage we’ve been talking about this week.

When the Boy and Girl Reunite, she is so much more important to him than she ever was before. He had her, he lost her and now he has her back again. If you ask someone who has reached the pinnacle of success about how they got there, they inevitably mention their many failures. That’s because you rarely have success without LOSS. With that said, LOSS without SALVATION, LOSS without hope is just LOSS.

We’re not looking for stories that tie everything up with a bow. Stories that end with endless sunshine and rainbows. But a story without a hint of hope will leave your readers…well, hopeless. And while reality doesn’t always necessarily end with a glimpse of hope, readers tend to like their stories with some semblance of resolution. They want their protagonist to experience some kind of REDEMPTION. They want him to have learned something from his journey along the way.

Maybe you want to buck tradition. I’m not in total disagreement. There have been some pretty bleak endings in fiction. But no matter how bleak the ending, if you look hard enough–no matter what the story is–you’ll be able to find a thread of SALVATION/REDEMPTION in there somewhere.

That should be your goal this week. Hopefully you have found a way to give a silver lining. Hopefully you have found a way to give your protagonist at least a glimpse of what he has been searching for, of what he found and lost but found once again. Your book will be better for it.

I’ve heard it said that writer’s write in order to make sense of their world. I would argue that reader’s read for the very same reason. Have you ever read a book and felt changed in some way? Is there at least one book that has literally changed your life? I can think of two or three for sure.

I’d like to think my writing has the impact to change someone’s life. And I’m not even speaking of drastic ways. I’m thinking on a smaller scale. If my words make my readers think about their world in a slightly different way or with that said, make them think at all, that would be enough. That’s salvation too.

My father is a Pentecostal preacher. He is retired, but it’s pretty much once a Pentecostal preacher always a Pentecostal preacher. He may not be standing behind a pulpit, but that’s not something you retire from. I told a story a couple of weeks ago to a potential investor of one of my latest projects. The topic came up about growing up with a father for a preacher.

While I’m not certain that my father ended every service this way, I know that he did it quite consistently. And it went something like this: “Before you leave this service tonight, you should search your heart and be certain that you’re ready to meet Him. You might be killed in an automobile accident on your way home from this service and you might not get a second chance. Just be certain that you are ready to meet Him face to face.”

The irony of this altar call–if you will–is the fact that for the biggest part of my childhood, our church was relatively small. There were times that the congregation was no more than immediate family. My dad. My mom. My brother. My grandmother. My grandfather. And why my father felt like giving an altar call–and such a dire one at that–to his own family, hadn’t really dawned on me before.

I’ve often given my father complete credit for my being a writer. There is no doubt in my mind that my father’s knack for telling a good story–irregardless of whether it included fire and brimstone and eternal damnation–was destined to rub off on me in some way or another. There was a brief stint in my life where I felt called to the ministry. Now that I look back on it, I wasn’t so much called to the “ministry” as I was called to tell stories. In many ways, it’s the same. But the reason for the altar call, even when your congregation is made up entirely of your family, is because SALVATION is the most important aspect of the Christian STORY. It’s everything.

And I didn’t tell that story to say that your SALVATION plotline has to be of the Christian variety. I tell that story to show that SALVATION is an important aspect of ALL stories in general. While it doesn’t have to be the focal point, some aspect of SALVATION/REDEMPTION is one of the most gratifying stories to tell. It is a HUGE canvas for a powerful story. Think of any movie, play, television show or book that you have ever read. Did it have a message of SALVATION? Did it have a message of REDEMPTION? I would wager a bet that it did!

America is a country of second chances. America is a country of the down and out pulling themselves up by their bootstraps and living the American dream. Shows like American Idol don’t have a gazillion viewers to see LOSS and failure. Yes, no doubt LOSS and failure have their role, but at the end of the season, someone goes home with a recording contract and a brand new life. In just one season we see a meteoric rise from someone we’ve never heard from to what seems like an overnight superstar. That’s SALVATION/REDEMPTION too.

Whether your story contains SALVATION/REDEMPTION of the spiritual kind or if it is in the vein of American Idol, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you create a story that keeps readers turning the pages and gives them a decent payoff. SALVATION is a perfect way to do that.

While you may think that SALVATION/REDEMPTION occurs at the end of most great novels, this plot device is much more than a way to end your novel. You’ll find that SALVATION is a plotline that runs through all facets of your story. Of course, there will be places where it is more prominent; whole stories can use SALVATION as their prominent theme.

We’ve spent the last week talking about LOSS. Now we’ll talk about SALVATION/REDEMPTION. One of the first things that comes to mind is the fact that–outside of a brief summary next week–we’ve reached the end of your first draft. A celebration is definitely in order.

During this writing journey, you’ve experienced all four of the main stories that we’ve been discussing in the last several weeks. You went through the SEARCH. You went through ATTAINMENT. You went through LOSS. And you experienced SALVATION and REDEMPTION. The writer’s path is often full of all four. Some experience more LOSS than ATTAINMENT. Some only get glimpses of SALVATION. But for most of us, it ebbs and flows. There are high highs and low lows. It’s all a part of the journey.

But for the rest of this week, we’ll focus on SALVATION/REDEMPTION. While the SALVATION/REDEMPTION stage shares qualities with ATTAINMENT, it is on a whole different level. Boy Getting Girl is a huge victory–and it is something he longed for–but once he lost her, that set in motion the stage of getting her back…which in this instance would be SALVATION/REDEMPTION. This level of SALVATION occurs only when something has been lost and then regained.

This is the stuff of Hollywood movies. This is when the girl gets on the plane at the end of the movie and the guy walks off with his head down low and then the girl appears in the baggage area–as the plane taxis down the runway–and they all live happily ever after.

That’s an oversimplification of course, but you get the point. This is when the adventurer gets the Holy Grail back after it was stolen from him the first time. SALVATION occurs after setback after setback. It is the ultimate payoff. SALVATION is enlightenment. This is when your character learns his lesson. This is when your protagonist grows up. This is when your protagonist conquers his own demons. And when you think about it, SALVATION is the beginning of a brand new journey. With SALVATION, brings a brand new search. This isn’t Hollywood; your protagonist may not live happily ever after, but SALVATION is at least the end of one leg of a journey with a vast and endless future.

SALVATION is not about everybody getting everything they wanted. It may include some of that, but that’s hardly the point. SALVATION may even be a revelation that they’ve had it all along. It can be a paradigm shift. A new path. A white light experience or one of the educational variety. This week, we’ll find ways to explore SALVATION in your first draft.

I posed a question at the end of this week’s Update and I’m going to answer it, I promise. And I’ll answer it by the end of this Wrap-UP, but I’m going to take my time.

We’ve been talking about LOSS this week. I’ll admit, writing about writing about LOSS is harder for me than just writing about LOSS. I’m not one to analyze why I write the kind of books I write. I just write them. But outside of the books I write for/with other people–in my capacity as a ghostwriter/editor–I tend to write pretty dark tales. If I could categorize my fiction, I would have to call it darkly comic literary fiction. I write with an edge.

There was a time that my writing was cathartic. At least I was hoping it would be cathartic when I wrote it. But mostly, my writing is dark because darkness is a lot more interesting to me. And I don’t think you have to be at a dark place to write about LOSS. I’ve been at my happiest when I was writing some pretty horrific things.

I think the reason I write so much about LOSS is that I think people really identify with it. We’ve all been through some terrible times in our lives. At this very moment, my mother-in-law is in a life or death struggle with cancer. Just a little over two years ago, my wife lost her younger brother in a very tragic way. I’ve lost several friends this year who left this world much too soon. But I’m preaching to the choir. We all lose people. It’s the nature of life.

One of the most well known tales of LOSS is the biblical story of Job. If I remember correctly, the Bible calls him a just man. And Satan–that cunning, baffling, powerful foe–challenges God to remove His hedge of protection from Job in an effort to prove that Job’s faithfulness is a direct result of God’s many blessings.

God does just that, but forbids Satan to inflict Job with bodily harm. He says that Satan can do anything he wants to Job’s worldly wealth, his friends, and his family, but he has to leave Job alone. If you know anything about Job, he had it all. He was blessed beyond measure. In pretty much one fell swoop, it was gone. This is an oversimplification, but Job’s reply to his loss is “God giveth and God taketh away, blesseth be the name of the Lord.”

And of course, Satan comes back with the challenge that Job would surely curse God if He removed His hedge of protection from Job himself. And God did just that, and old Slewfoot covered Job’s body in sores. But through it all, Job remained a righteous man.

How interesting would the story of Job be without LOSS? It wouldn’t be much of a story at all! It would be a story about a man who has it all. Which leads me to answer the question I posed in this week’s Update: Why do most of the books found in bookstores have more than their fair share of LOSS? Because readers like rags to riches stories. Readers like to read about characters who have lost it all…but have persevered. Ahh, there it is again: SALVATION. We’ll talk about that…next week.

Some of the most powerful books ever written, detail man’s struggle with his faith. LOSS can definitely be linked to the physical–as in Boy Loses Girl–but don’t lose sight of the remarkable stories found in a man’s LOSS of faith. We’ve got to talk about LOSS before we can talk about SALVATION/REDEMPTION.

If it’s not faith we’re talking about, you should still think about LOSS in terms of something other than the physical. It can be the loss of one’s ethics, ideals, dreams, and ambitions. With that said, these are the kind of things that are often linked to the physical. Let’s take for example the Boy Loses Girl scenario.

Losing the girl is closely tied to losing the ideal of having a perfect family. He’s not just missing the companionship, he’s missing out on the American dream. He’s losing the very things that we want in a relationship in the first place. Someone to share your life with. Someone to share your ideals with. Someone to make memories with, etc. etc. And in the loss of this relationship, all of these things are lost as well.

All isn’t necessarily lost with the departure of this one girl. There are many other opportunities out there. Many other fish in the sea, so to speak. But when you’re in the midst of a breakup, you don’t get that. You only see the bleakness.

You might want to approach LOSS with a positive spin. Maybe your protagonist needs to lose something in order to find it. Yes, I know I keep throwing references out to the upcoming lesson on SALVATION. But you can’t really get around it. In every great story of LOSS, SALVATION isn’t far away. But LOSS is a necessary piece of that puzzle. How can you be found if you weren’t lost in the first place? 

The whole point of this update is to get you thinking about LOSS outside of the normal narratives of losing a child, a girlfriend, a job…and search for a story that provides LOSS on a deeper level. It’s possible to have both. Maybe the loss of a child–as is the case in The Anguish of Angus Bluefeet–is at the core of your protagonist’s loss of faith.

I’m not one who likes to write his novels with some big theme in mind, but  I recognize that introducing something like a character’s loss of faith or a loss of his hopes and dreams, opens up a myriad of storylines to choose from. This first draft is all about throwing plotlines out there and seeing if they stick.

I still plan to write a novel some day that is void of LOSS and is totally concerned with a man’s unwavering happiness, but there’s a reason I haven’t written that book yet. There’s a reason that most of the books found in the bookstore have more than their fair share of LOSS. Are you ready for the answer? We’ll talk about that in this week’s Wrap-UP.